Towards engineering Hofstadter ladders with Raman-coupled bosonic mixtures

Raman coupling of Bose-Einstein condensates (BEC) creates optically dressed states with an engineered dispersion relation and momentum-dependent scattering properties. Our experiment combines this versatile tool with the tunable interactions in ultracold potassium mixtures, enabling us to investigate synthetic quantum matter ranging from exotic superfluids to artificial gauge fields. In my poster I will report on our progress towards realizing Hofstadter ladders using the atomic spin states as a synthetic dimension coupled via a Raman transition. This system is governed by a tunable artificial flux, arising from the competition between Raman coupling and the tunable spacing of an accordion lattice. It thereby realizes a minimal instance of the Harper-Hofstadter model, which describes charged particles in a lattice with a perpendicular magnetic field and hosts exotic phenomena like a fractal energy spectrum and strongly correlated phases.